I can see the logic, and am probably ok with it – particularly if they compensate some of the hulls Jester flagged as problematic. I do however have a hanger bay full of ships that I need to review the fittings of, and this change will only add move hulls to the list to review. It gets to the point of not being fun.

I had been wondering how they would try to address this – particularly given the cries of nerf Empire which seem to be so prevalent. For the most part however they concentrated on buffing Low and Null Sec.

Ore Mining –

They have buffered the Tritanium, Pyerite, Mexallon and Isogen volumes in some of the Ores found outside of Empire – making them both worth noticeably more, and possibly making it more viable to mine your requirements for these outside of Empire.

Hidden belts will no longer be searched for via Exploration – they will be available via the onboard system scanner. Reading between the lines I expect this will also include an Empire nerf, by ensuring you can’t find these boosted asteroids in any Empire sites.

Ice Mining –

They are removing static Ice Belts. You will find Ice in Anomalies, spawned in systems that previously had Ice Belts (excluding some removed for good in Amarr aligned empire space). These sites will respawn every 4 hours – to allow their use across all timezones. The empire sites will contain enough resources for around 80% of the games fuel needs. Oddly they are halving the cycle time of Ice Harvesters by 50%. It is an empire Nerf, but not one the average player is likely to complain about.

Player Outposts –

They are substantially boosting the number of installations available on all player-built outposts, making it much more viable to use them for all your manufacturing needs. I think this should have been done a long time ago.

Moon mining and T2 Production –

There are changes to reduce the Technetium bottlenecks, and to more evenly spread the four rarest moon minerals around. I can’t comment on the full impact of these changes, although I do like that they are making each R64 mineral more strongly associated with each Empire’s Tech Two ships. I like that dynamic.

Null Sec Anomalies

Another area I can’t fully comment on – but it reads as a bit of rebalancing and adding warp disrupting NPC’s into any high level anomalies currently lacking them.

I am sure there will be plenty of unhappy people, but for the average casual empire player these changes, aside initial disruptions and price fluctuations, won’t really change their game too much. I’m not entirely sure you will see anything but minor population shifts, but the changes should make it more viable for those already out of Empire to be more self-reliant.

I effectively only played EVE “properly” for the first week of March. The next two weeks I was lucky to scrap together two hours in total of frequently interrupted, spread out game play. The last week was slightly improved, with maybe 4 hours played.

Fluid ISK at the start of April

I only keep an amateurish measurement of my Trade and Industry profits – based around fluid ISK.

I identified no new market opportunities – mainly as I didn’t look for any.

There was not much turn over on my speculative buy orders on low volume but expensive hulls – in fact, I had new competition on most of them. Of interest is the fact it is mostly Carebear type ships which flip to these low buy orders, not PVP.

I only have a couple hundred units of Station Containers left – all in Low Sec. These are selling at around 7 times build cost. I’ve noticed the entire Station Container market in the region has settled on an average price of around 10 times build cost or more. I still have 1,000 odd small, medium and large containers, which are selling slowly for generally low profits.

Destroyer hulls continue to flip well – but I have had new competition.

Faction Tag turnover was lower due to competition and a lack of sellers.

Flipping of T2 Modules was lower this month – both due to competition, and I think just generally less sellers.

Flipping Mining hulls continues to be profitable, but again there is a lot of competition. I am no longer bothering with Ventures, just because of the small profits considering the size of the hull you have to haul.

I collected some 70 odd T1 Industry Hulls in preparation for their rebalancing. I’ve stockpiled these and cancelled my buy orders. They are just too annoying to collect due to size.

I don’t have any implants on the market at the moment. I only follow a couple options, and those markets are flooded.

I didn’t get into Mineral sales, but did collect a small volume of POS fuel at reasonable prices.

Competition was heavy this month in almost all areas I dabble, including some I’ve had almost exclusively to myself, or which really provide minimal profits. I just couldn’t play enough to try and stay ahead of their buy orders.

I think I only managed 2, maybe 3 PI runs for the month. That is unfortunate as Robotics remain profitable.

I offlined the POS – I simply didn’t have the time to make use of it. It is still anchored and ready to go.

Training

Account 1 (Main) – A hodgepodge of training in March, in part working on the Capital plan, in part random. He finished off Repair Drone Operation V, got Citadel Torpedoes and Capital Hybrid Turret to rank IV, and Capital Remote Hull Repair to III. Electronic Superiority, Astronautics and Launcher Rigging skills to IV, Cynosural Field Theory, Nanite Operation and Nanite Interfacing to IV, and got the newish skills Target Breaker Amplification and Armor Honeycombing to IV, and Micro Jump Drive Operation to III. He is currently working on Capital Projectile Turret IV.

Account 2 (Main Alt) – The main skill trained was Electronic Attack Ships V. He also picked up a couple Rigging skills to IV, Metallurgy to IV, and Micro Jump Drive Operation to IV. He is currently working on Trade skills.

Account 3 (Industry Alt) – I completed all my Destroyer and Battlecruiser training on all pilots on the account. Training is back to my main Industry Alt, who is working on Anchoring V to allow her to man POS guns if ever needed.

Game Play

Very little this month – mostly sporadic trade updates, a couple collection runs of buy orders, and a couple of PI runs. My main did spend a little time setting up an Ashimmu for PVP and testing it out on my Alt, which kept me amused for a while.

Plans

None right now – I am just forced to focus almost exclusively on RL.

I still haven’t had the opportunity to look closer at the Corp and Alliance options – but it does look like there will be updates in the next release so at least I will be in a position to review them fully.

Speaking of the new release mid-year, the resource re-balancing will likely have a major impact on supply and prices for a while. There is actually a risk of lower prices, depending on how it is done – so speculative buying is probably risky. If I get the time, I might look to stockpile additional ingredients for myself, so I can ride out any peaks or troughs, and possibly profit if it works out better to sell than manufacture with them.

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